Advertising

Achieving Critical Mass: The Future of GumGum and In-Image Advertising

Mike Rosner is the Chief Revenue Officer at GumGum, the world’s largest in-image advertising provider. Mike has led national and global sales teams since 1999 and spent time at PointRoll, EyeWonder, MediaMind and DoubleClick. In this newly created role at GumGum, Mike will oversee multiple revenue streams and will be primarily responsible for leading GumGum’s worldwide sales organization in the delivery of its premium advertising solutions for agencies and brands. The Makegood recently spoke with Mike about his new position.

The Makegood: Congratulations on your recent hire to GumGum as Chief Revenue Officer. This is a new position at GumGum. How does that drive you as you enter this new role?

The newly-created role of CRO is an indication that GumGum and in-image advertising has achieved critical mass. We now have the opportunity to lead the pack and bring a truly differentiated product to market. We are one of few digital inventory aggregators who solve the issue of targeting based on data from images. Further, our placement in-line with images where users focus their attention is arguably the most viewable and noticeable pieces of real estate on any page.

The Makegood: Can you describe some of your past experiences and how they will impact what you bring to the table as part of GumGum?

Over the past 16 years, I’ve been fortunate to be part of some world-class sales organizations, including DoubleClick, PointRoll, adMarketplace, EyeWonder, Sizmek (fka MediaMind) and Beanstock Media. During that time, I received an extensive understanding of both the technology and media sides of the digital advertising business. GumGum brings both of those disciplines together seamlessly to create uniquely targeted rich media experiences served across unique in-image placements. So, from that perspective I am excited to apply my experience to help harness the best of both worlds at GumGum.

The Makegood: GumGum is seen as a leader, in terms of viewability and other metrics that are still troubling players in the overarching ad industry. Please describe the best practices you’ve seen since joining GumGum.

GumGum ads are inherently viewable, based both on their placement in-line with content and the fact that in-image ads only load when a photo is within the visible area of a browser. In fact, several third-party measurement firms have shown GumGum to be among the most viewable ad units available today.

As the industry has embraced how to solve for issues relating to viewability, GumGum has been an active participant in helping the industry better understand this important topic. We recently published an infographic (http://gumgum.com/beseen) outlining the state of viewability and how in-image ads stack up against industry benchmarks.

The Makegood: What evolution will we see in the in-image category in the remainder of the year and in 2015? How will it grow?

I anticipate big progress in the area of deep learning and the ability to apply a more in-depth understanding of images to advertising and revenue generation, both directly and indirectly. We’ve seen some of this already with image technology acquisitions made by Yahoo!, Twitter, DropBox, Pinterest, Google and others.

The trend here shows the visual web has achieved critical mass. Wired says currently six out of ten impressions are driven by images. Couple that with our ability to understand what images are about at a deep technical level, and you can see why we expect even more interest in the in-image category from agencies and brands in 2015.